Recession? I didn't see it coming admits Brown
GORDON Brown refused to admit yesterday that Britain was as good as bust as figures confirmed we are officially in recession and that the economy is in its sorriest state for 28 years.
The statistics revealed that the economy shrank by 1.5 per cent in the last three months of 2008 with the steepest quarterly fall since 1980.
The data was far worse than expected and added to mounting concerns that the economic turbulence will be longer and more ferocious than anyone feared.
Mr Brown confessed he did not see the economic woes gathering, saying: “What we didn’t see – and nobody saw – was the possibility of complete market failure; that markets seized up across the world.”
Asked repeatedly by BBC presenter Evan Davies to confess that his boast of having ended boom and bust was now a tattered fiction, Mr Brown 12 times refused to do so.
Mr Davies said: “You’re hanging your head as I even say the words.”
Mr Brown replied: “No, I’m not hanging my head at all.”
Instead Mr Brown insisted that the crisis had all been caused by a global financial failure and was quite different from anything we’ve dealt with before.
The Prime Minister then claimed no one had seen it coming – despite Tory and Lib Dem warnings.
In the face of growing evidence that two major bank bail-outs have not worked and the failure of his plan to boost demand by an expensive cut in VAT, Mr Brown insisted that more of the same would stave off an even worse collapse.
Echoing Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase, the Prime Minister said “there is no alternative” to pumping further billions into banks and public spending.
Two hours later, Chancellor Alistair Darling strongly hinted that he would be forced to tear up forecasts made just three months ago that the economy would be growing again by this autumn.
Yesterday’s dismal data marked the point when Britain officially entered recession – defined by many economists as two successive quarters of negative growth.
The worse-than-expected contraction sent sterling crashing to a 24-year low against the dollar, with one pound buying just $1.355.
The markets were also reeling, with the FTSE 100 index crashing almost 2 per cent, dropping below 4,000 points before a slight recovery.
Tory leader David Cameron said: “I think what the British people need is a government that has a clear plan for helping.
“But what they have at the moment is a Government announcing so many different things on so many different days that it almost undermines confidence.”
And in a bizarre development last night a former top aide to Tony Blair claimed the only way Labour could save its reputation was for Mr Brown to admit the party has now lost the next general election.
Former Downing Street strategy chief Matthew Taylor said: “Labour needs a radically different communication strategy. This might, for example, involve an explicit refusal to engage in party politics while the economic storm is raging.
“Brown’s message might be: ‘I am reconciled to the likelihood of losing the next election.”
